Biden, Kinnock
Never mind whether Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del) copied a speech from Britain’s Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock (Part I, Sept. 13). Let’s ask instead whether it was worth copying.
Kinnock and Biden ask, in injured tones, why it is that a thousand generations of their ancestors never went to a university. Was it because all those ancestors were “thick”?
I would answer, for openers, that for well over 950 of those generations, there were no universities for them to go to. The earliest European universities got started around the year 1200.
This is just one example of how ridiculous it is to project a political program back over a thousand generations. A lot of things have changed in a thousand generations. To pretend that a political platform in 1987 addresses a need felt for 20,000 years is the height of pomposity.
I don’t know whether the Kinnocks and Bidens of the Old Stone Age were thick. But I’ll swear that the present ones are.
JOHN CRONQUIST
Fullerton
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